In certain locations, such as residential, commercial and industrial buildings, installations, etc., it may be desirous to monitor, control and/or collect information (e.g., node information) generated by one or more sensors and/or measuring or control devices distributed throughout the location. Since each of these sensors, measuring and/or control devices may be randomly distributed throughout the location, it is advantageous to provide the generated information to at least one centralized location, such as an access point, from which the information may be transferred to a local and/or remote server and database, analyzed and/or further processed.
For this purpose, each of the sensors, measuring and/or control devices may be hardwired to the centralized location. However, it is believed that this may be costly and inefficient, especially if new sensors, measuring and/or control devices need to be added at a subsequent time.
As an alternative, each of the sensors, measuring and/or control devices may be connected to, for example, a network node operable to wirelessly transmit and receive its respective node information to and from a centralized location. However, it is believed that such a system is difficult to implement, considering low power transmission requirements and possibly disadvantageous environmental conditions, if at least one of the network nodes is blocked, for example, by an obstacle, ambient noise, interference, etc., from transmitting or receiving its related node information.